New Tech for Participatory Planning: Grade A for a grey day

The Open Planning Project hosted New Technology for Participatory Planning – an ‘unconference’ last Friday, and what a grade A way to spend a grey day at the end of the week. The crowd was a pretty even split of techies and planners – the Regional Planning Association co-hosted. So the room was full of [...]

“Best Square Wins” Goes Public

Turnstone is delighted to report that one of our favorite grad school exercises is busting out of the classroom next week: “Best Square Wins”, an educational ‘graphics exercise crossed with Survivor’, will be played out to the general public on Tuesday next week, as part of “The Public School for Architecture”, a project for public [...]

Reporting Back from The Bigger Picture (3): Got any small change?

Here’s the third and final installment of Ben Reizenstein’s round up from The Bigger Picture, part of nef’s Day of Interdependence, which took place last weekend in London: 
I don’t catch the name of the woman who is suddenly standing next to the queue, talking to us, her captive audience, about local currencies in the Welsh [...]

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen

As explained in the post preceding this one, we have been canvassing designers, technologists, academics, all sorts for their suggestions of girl geeks they admire.
Thanks to all who responded so enthusiastically. Turnstone is overwhelmed, inspired and grateful to you for taking the time to send names of the girl geeks, in response to our earlier [...]

Tell us: Which women maker/thinkers do you most rate?

Who are the women under 40* you most admire for doing cool stuff in tech-focused innovation and education, science, product and service design, bio- and medical research, gaming, digital publishing right now? 
We’ll tell you why we’re asking soon. We’ve already lined up a shortlist, but if you’d like to volunteer your peers, your self or [...]

Artist: Sounds a bit like ‘activist’

It’s that time of year, after the summer sag, before halloween then holiday mayhem, when every man and his erudite dog has a right-on event going this weekend. While NEF’s Day of Interdependence (mentioned here a post or two ago) takes place in London on Saturday (we’ll have a report from there next week), Eyebeam [...]

October Roundup: Measuring progress by foot

Over the last week, Turnstone tiptoed to the green roof above the Open Planning Project’s new office, just up Lafayette St, reminiscent of the lovely SCI-Arc-designed one in Downtown LA on top of the ex-Holiday Inn (now called ‘The Flats’); on the latest carless trip to LA this month, walked to the Petersen Automobile Museum [...]

Work, not rain, stops play

Strange of us to pick a cricketing phrase for this week’s headline. Occasionally these vestigial Brit phrases burp up from nowhere. Anyway, we’re back. Excuse the silence, we had a spiffy interaction design project to work on at all hours, in collaboration with our London friends at Maoworks, and now we’re back.
Hiding from the rain, [...]

Hey, Mister Tech President

Turnstone went to listen in on a talk in SVA’s IxD series last week, by Scott Thomas, who is Former Design Director of Obama For America. We wrote up this review for TechPresident, one of the blogs hosted by the Personal Democracy Forum, just in time to plug Mr Thomas’ fancy-looking Designing Obama, a tome [...]

Start Mapping Sense in the City

A LOT going on this week. The Conflux festival is in full swing and the Sentient Cities exhibit has just opened at the Architectural League. With info space meets physical place in mind, we’re excited that there are efforts underway to persuade the powers that be to open up NYC Transit data, along the lines [...]